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Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Gordon Brown still banging the same drum

As Brown prepares to become just the fifth Prime Minister to address both US Houses we find him still refusing to admit culpability and still refusing to accept that the problems caused by globalisation can not be rectified by more of the same.

He is set to emphasise that the crisis was caused by international problems and requires global solutions.

It's nice of him to admit the fact that the crisis was indeed caused by "international problems" - i.e. globalisation, but his continued belief that the only way out of this is more globalisation highlights the closed mind approach of the progressives. There isn't a "third way" - only their way.

Ever since the Great Depression, economic experts have argued about what caused it. The general opinion of these experts was that it was caused by protectionism - even though it wasn't until 1933 that protectionism seriously started to be used and that year happens to be the year that most experts agree was the turning point of The Great Depression.

That argument has now been refuted as we are now living through the same sort of crisis that they experienced in 1929 for exactly the same reasons - a globalised financial system creating an enormous debt bubble. Only this time it is much worse.

We can repeat the mistakes of 1929-1933 and carry on the same path for four years while things get worse and worse (so increasing the likelihood of a rise in militaristic nationalism) or we can adopt a rational nationalism - the sort that Britain used to be famous for - and start to turn things around now.

What is certain is that we must never ever allow this to happen again. It was more than two hundred years ago when Thomas Jefferson warned us about the dangers of globalisation and corporatism - although his warning was in a national context.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered"

That's what happened in 1929 and that is what is happening now - only in a global context.